The Year of Magical Manifesting...

Out of thin air two writing opportunities came in to my life earlier this week.

I'm applying to Grubstreet's Novel Generator (fingers crossed) and I'm signed up for a writing group with a gaggle of women I've deemed new-age-Newton-moms.  They may or may not actually be Newton moms.  I only assume as much because the instructor suggested we find time to write 10 minutes a day "even if it's while waiting to pick up a kid after soccer practice" or something to that effect.

I loved my essay writing workshop earlier this year, so I'm pretty stoked for this group and excited about the prompts the organizer is coming to the table with especially after getting an email from her last night that included some inspiration from Joan Didion.  She sent us Joan's essay "Why I Write," in which Joan admits she stole the title from George Orwell in part because she just liked the way the words sounded strung along the way they are and that "there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space."

I am 100% guilty of being a secret bully.  Case in point: my relentless emails to the men in my life.

More on that tactic later.  For now, it delights me that Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking (which I picked up on a Barnes & Noble detour one day three or four years ago between when I'd done the Artist's Way and when I'd moved to California) made it through my purge earlier this year.  It brings me joy - her writing about writing.

So does writing, so does identifying as a writer, so does associating with other writers, and so does trusting in the magic a year can possess.